AWS Shuts Down DeepComposer, Its AI Music MIDI Keyboard

AWS’s bizarre AI-powered keyboard experiment, DeepComposer, will no longer be happening.

Today, the company announced in a blog post that it is shutting down five-year-old DeepComposer, an AWS service that combines a physical MIDI piano with a grand piano that lets users compose songs with the help of generative AI.

“After careful consideration, we have made the decision to end support for AWS DeepComposer,” wrote Kanchan Jagannathan, AI Devices Program Manager at AWS. “If you have data saved in the AWS DeepComposer console, you will be able to use AWS DeepComposer as usual until September 17, 2025, at which time support for the service will end.”

DeepComposer, launched in 2019 at AWS’s annual re:Invent conference, was a 32-key, two-octave MIDI keyboard and a collection of AI-powered music generation tools that AWS rather grandly called “the world’s first machine-learning-powered musical keyboard for developers.”

Using AWS DeepComposer, users could record a melody using a physical keyboard or on-screen keys, select a genre-specific music generation model, and have DeepComposer create a full-length song. The finished song could be played in the AWS console or exported and shared on SoundCloud.

DeepComposer was initially a developer-only product, but in 2020 it was made available to all AWS customers. The MIDI keyboard was available for $99.

Opinions on DeepComposer’s ease of use—and musicality—were mixed, with many MIDI keyboard reviewers complaining they couldn’t get the keys to work properly, and the AI ​​instrumentation left much to be desired.

My colleague Frederic Lardinois was similarly disappointed when he tried DeepComposer in 2019. But as he notes in his article , DeepComposer was always intended to be more of a learning tool than a tool for writing the next Top 40 song — much like other AWS AI devices like the DeepLens camera and the DeepRacer AI car.